Blender 2.8 (Python) - convert text to mesh
The laziest way to do it is to use the same operation that the Alt-c performs when done interactively : bpy.ops.object.convert(target="MESH") .  Unfortunately, this shares the problem of every function in bpy.ops.  You have to set up the interactive environment (what object is active/selected).  It would look something like this:

import bpy

def mission1(obj):
    scn = bpy.context.scene
    for o2 in scn.objects:
        o2.select = ( o2 == obj )
    scn.objects.active = obj

    bpy.ops.object.convert(target="MESH")

mission1(bpy.data.objects['Text.001'])


If there is a way to accomplish this without using bpy.ops, I was too lazy to dig it up.